Adequate reading comprehension is necessary for the re-entry of older adults into community education programs, functioning in a complex society and personal enjoyment from reading. A crucial ability in reading comprehension may be the identification and utilization of the top-level organizational pattern of a passage provided for the reader by the author. Past research has shown a deficit in the use of organization by older adults. Little memory research with the elderly has been done with prose materials, but present data show a performance decrement with age. However, most of the research examining organizational deficits in the elderly has been conducted with lists of words, rather than prose. The proposed studies use a recently developed prose analysis system (Meyer, 1975) to determine if the use of the author's top-level organization or schema in prose varies across the adult life-span. This prose analysis methodology has proved reliable and useful, and permits a comparison between the organization of a passage and the organization of what a reader remembers from a passage. Using this methodology the proposed research focuses on determining: (a) Are there age differences in the use of the author's top-level organization of a passage and the organization of what a reader remembers from a passage. (b) Are there age differences in use of signals or cues given by an author to assist a reader in identifying the author's top-level organization of the passage? (c) Are there age differences in the types of information recalled from prose? (d) Do different top-level discourse organizations facilitate recall from certain adult age groups and not others? (e) What types of training programs, special instructions, or writing techniques can be used to facilitate learning and memory from prose in the elderly? These proposed studies with young, middle-aged, and older adults will provide valuable data for theoretical formulations of age trends in learning and memory from prose. In addition, the findings will provide a strong data base for designing training programs to improve reading comprehension in the elderly as well as providing guidelines for authors of reading materials for older adults.